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Beef Tallow on Your Face: The Trend the Internet Has Completely Lost Its Mind Over

Fifth in the drawer of shame series, and easily the one that made me say "we're doing what now?" out loud in the kitchen.

I promised you last time that we'd tackle the thing the internet is currently losing its mind over. I had a few candidates. But one has been shoved so relentlessly into my feed, by so many earnest people with mason jars, that it wins by a landslide.

Rendered beef fat. On your face. As skincare.

Yes, tallow. The stuff my nan fried chips in. It is being sold in little tubs, often for surprising money, as an "ancestral," "natural," "the way our great-grandparents did it" miracle for acne, wrinkles, eczema, the lot. The videos are earnest, the lighting is warm, the word "clean" appears roughly every four seconds, and somewhere a cow is very confused about its new role in the beauty industry.

So I did what I do. I put the mason jar down and went to find out whether there is anything to it, or whether we have all been gently mooed at by marketing. Here's the honest answer, and it has one genuine nuance that surprised me.

A brief confession about how it found me

I would love to tell you I discovered this trend through rigorous research. The truth is I discovered it on the couch, watching The McBee Dynasty, which if you haven't seen it is a reality show about a family who run an enormous cattle ranch in America. Yes, I watch it. No, I do not own a single cow, and my knowledge of ranching begins and ends with that television program. Do not tell anyone.

Anyway, on the show, Kacie Adkison, the fiancée of one of the McBee sons, starts making skincare out of the farm's own grass-fed beef tallow. It began as something for her daughter and turned into an actual business, and by all accounts it is selling like absolute hotcakes. Good on her, genuinely. It is a lovely story, she seems lovely, and the products may well be perfectly nice heavy moisturisers.

But a lovely story is not the same as evidence, and this is precisely where I have to put my "not an influencer, the opposite" hat back on. Also, and I'm slightly concerned about myself here, this is now the second time a farming show has sent me shopping for skincare. The snail essence was Clarkson's Farm. Now beef tallow is the McBees. At this rate my next verdict will be sponsored by a documentary about goats. Somebody stage an intervention.

So, cattle drama aside, let's do the boring bit the ads skip: does slathering beef fat on your face actually work?

First, why it went viral

The pitch is clever, I'll give it that. Tallow is sold as the anti-serum. No lab, no chemicals, no big brand, just honest animal fat like nature intended. In a world exhausted by $189 miracle serums, and after everything I've told you about those, "simple and natural" is a genuinely appealing story. I understand completely why people fell for it. I nearly did.

And here's a fact the sellers love: tallow contains some vitamins, including vitamin A, and its fat structure is a bit like the natural oils in our own skin. That's true. It's also where the honesty tends to stop and the wishful thinking begins.

What the science actually says, which is not much

Here is the first problem, and it's a big one. Despite the billions of views, there is basically no real research behind the big claims. A 2025 review that actually went through the viral tallow posts found that claims of curing acne, eczema and psoriasis were everywhere, and almost none of them cited any evidence at all. The same review found that most of the posts pushing tallow were made by people with no healthcare qualifications, and a large share had a financial reason to spruik it, because they were selling the stuff.

That last part should sound familiar. It's the exact pattern I keep warning you about. When the loudest voices for a product are the ones profiting from it, and the evidence file is empty, your alarm should be ringing.

On the specific claims: the "it's like retinol because it has vitamin A" line is a favourite, and dermatologists are clear that there is no good evidence the vitamin A in tallow does anything retinol-like for your skin. Eating the story does not make it true.

The genuinely annoying part, especially if you have breakouts

Here is where it goes from "probably useless" to "possibly a bad idea for a lot of people." Tallow is comedogenic, which is the technical word for pore-clogging. A prominent dermatologist puts it high on the comedogenic scale, right up there with coconut oil and lanolin, both famous for triggering breakouts. Some sellers claim it's low on that scale. Dermatologists disagree.

So the product being marketed hardest as an acne cure is, for many people, one of the more likely things to cause the very breakouts they're trying to fix. If you have acne, rosacea, or oily skin, tallow can genuinely make things worse. Slathering beef fat on an oily, breakout-prone face is, dermatologically speaking, a plot twist nobody needs.

The one honest nuance, because I promised you fairness

Now, I am not going to pretend it does nothing, because that would be its own kind of hype. Here is the genuinely fair bit.

Tallow is a rich, heavy fat, and heavy fats are good at one thing: sitting on top of the skin and stopping water escaping. So as a plain, old-fashioned moisturiser for very dry skin, tallow can actually feel quite nice and be mildly useful. If your skin is parched, not oily, not breakout-prone, and you enjoy the ritual, it will soften things up.

But, and this is the whole point, that is exactly what a $10 tub of plain moisturiser or a jar of Vaseline does, without the acne risk, the fridge smell, or the permanent faint whiff of a Sunday roast. You are paying a premium and taking a pore-clogging gamble to do a job that boring, cheap products already do better and more safely.

So who is it actually for?

The honest verdict

Beef tallow is not poison and it's not a miracle. It's a heavy, occlusive fat that can soften very dry skin and can clog a lot of other people's pores, wrapped in an "ancestral, natural, clean" story that the evidence simply does not back up. For most faces, especially breakout-prone ones, it lands squarely in save your money.

It's the same lesson as always, just with a more agricultural twist. The loudest sellers had the least evidence, the "natural" halo switched off everyone's judgement, and a cheap, boring moisturiser quietly does the one real job better. Keep the tallow for the roast potatoes. Your face has other options.

Next time: the gadget half of you have in an online cart right now, and whether it's worth the eye-watering price or belongs in the drawer with everything else. Bring a cup of tea.

Everything here is educational, not medical advice. I'm not qualified and I won't pretend to be. If you have persistent acne, eczema or any skin condition that's bothering you, that's a conversation for your GP or a dermatologist, not a jar of beef fat.

Some links on this site earn a small commission, at no cost to you. I write the verdict first and add the link second, and as this one shows, plenty of my verdicts tell you to buy nothing at all.

Where I got this

The honest caveat: tallow genuinely can moisturise very dry, calm skin, so it isn't a total dud. But there's no good evidence for the big acne and anti-ageing claims, and for breakout-prone skin it's more likely to hurt than help. A plain moisturiser does the good bit without the risk.

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